I stupidly bought a nVidia graphics card - being just about the only graphics card manufacturer who insist on releasing their own binary code, it is buggy and unstable.

When the card died yesterday, I was actually relieved to have an excuse to go back to the less powerful (but supported) i810.

It is not just bad for the Linux kernel on a philosophical level, it is bad for users, who get buggy, poorly-written code which is unsupportable.

The reason you get a shirty response when you post a bug to LKML with a binary driver is not just philosophy, it's a practical issue too - if you are running code in your kernel but nobody - even kernel developers - knows what it is doing, it is not just unsupported, it is unsupportable.